In March 1950, Willie Sutton, a prolific American bank robber, was asked by a news reporter about why during his 45-year criminal career he only stole banks. Willie simply answered, “Because that’s where the money is”.
When it comes to business the reason why you should focus on marketing is the same, that’s where the money is!
From that time, people missed the real meaning of marketing, they thought it was advertising, branding, or promotion. Here below is a simple way to understand the meaning of marketing.
Imagine a conference is coming to town and you paint a sign saying “The big conference is coming this Saturday” that’s advertising.
If you put out the sign on the back of a truck and drive it into town that’s promotion.
If the truck was well decorated and the local newspaper writes about it, that’s publicity.
If the town citizens go to the conference, you show them how much knowledge they’ll have, explain to them how much fun they’ll have spending money at the conference booths, that’s sales.
And if you planned the whole thing, that’s marketing. Yup, it’s as simple as that – marketing is the strategy you use for getting your ideal target market to know you, like you and trust you enough to become a customer.
The modern marketing era started in 1960 when Jerome McCarthy came up with the “4P’s of Marketing” concept that sets up controllable variables to help brands influence their buyers’ response.
After 7 years, Philip Kotler, the father of modern marketing, had popularized this concept in his book & make it the marketing bible.
The digital age took off with the coming of the internet and development of the web 1.0 platform (1989) when users were allowed to find the information they wanted but not allowed to share this information over.
Digital is neither the technology nor the social networks, Digital is about 4 things; Speed, Agility, Competing differently & Making things easy.
These things are powered by a range of technologies and computer sciences.
With the emergence of digital in all business areas, the era of digital transformation had begun with full focus on optimizing the customer experience through an omni-channel approach and integrating between all possible digital methodologies and strategies.